Soulwoven (37 page)

Cole followed Dil into the pool.

The water was lukewarm and silky, and it clung to his body as if it was made of something much more viscous than the output of a spring. Dil walked in up to her shoulders. Cole went in to his chest. Alain floated motionlessly between them.

Cole couldn’t see the cave the old man had spoken of. There was nothing around the pool but grass.

The water played around his legs, and he stood and watched Dil. Her chin was tucked against her chest. Her lips quivered. She bobbed back through the water toward him, and when she reached him, she stood close enough that he could feel the heat of her body.

“Dil…” he began.

But he didn’t know what to say.

She clutched his shirt.

“In a second,” she said, “you’re going to feel like you’re not yourself anymore—like your
body’s
different. It won’t be. You’re still you. Remember that.”

She took his hand.

“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. “Please.”

And his whole world changed.

His legs and feet pressed against one another. His arms pinned themselves to his sides. His eyes fixed open. His body stiffened.

He couldn’t breathe.

He panicked and tried to wriggle from side to side, but something had a strong hold on his midsection. He needed water.
Needed to be wet, to be cold, and to breathe.
A hand put pressure on his shoulders and forced him down until his head hit liquid.

His lungs filled with water, and then he could breathe again.

The hand let him go. He flicked his legs and dove for the bottom of the pool, and then he let himself drift. His heart thundered fast and fearful against his ribs.

A human-size, long-haired, familiar shape floated toward him from the surface. Some part of its midsection gripped a larger, heavier shape and dragged it along. The first shape belonged in his world. The second didn’t. It was too big and too blocky, and it looked out of place in the water.

But the first shape he knew. It swam past him, towing its burden.

He followed.

He trailed it along the bottom of the pool. Thick mud slipped by under his belly. Bubbles and tiny bits of edible somethings floated in the water around him. Pressure squeezed his head, but he didn’t mind it.

A passageway opened in a wall of black rock at the edge of the pool. The shape he knew entered it, and he followed past jagged ledges into a little tunnel. The shaft angled upward. Bits of algae hung from its roof. He soon reached the mirrored, rippling plane of the water’s surface.

His friend-shape swam to the edge of the water and changed. Its tail-like back end split into two flailing halves. Its middle divided into a central trunk with two thinner stalks attached to it. The lower bits settled on the rock and propelled the rest of it up through the surface. The middle bits dragged along the blocky burden they’d been carrying. Only his friend-shape’s feet were left to him, and those feet jerked desperately, as if something violent was happening in the breathless world above.

Cole panicked again. He cared for this thing—this shape, whatever it was. He wanted to help it, and he didn’t want it to leave him alone. He swam up against its splintered tail bits and rubbed his face on them. He nibbled at them desperately. It was all he could think to do.

Then he couldn’t breathe again.

His feet felt like feet. There was water in his nose, his mouth, his chest.

He stood up, and his torso broke through the surface. Muscles he didn’t even know he had went rock solid in his abdomen,
then
pulsed again and again, and he spewed water out of his mouth at the same time he was trying to gasp in air through his nose. His arms and legs buzzed and shook. His fingers scrabbled on wet rock, searching for something, anything, to help him.

A hand grabbed them. Its digits wrapped tightly around his and pulled him out of the water. An arm circled his chest and hugged him against a warm, soft body until the coughing stopped and the water was gone and he could breathe again.

Mucus streamed from his nose. His lungs took in air in quick gasps.

“Shh,” said a voice. A hand stroked his hair. He laid his head against a shoulder and let himself relax.

And then he opened his eyes.

He was on his knees, leaning against Dil at one end of a round, dirt-floored cave. Thousands of blue iridescent dots clung to the walls. Strings of pale green moss dangled from the ceiling and trailed across the top of his head.

Alain lay on the ground nearby. The old man’s eyes were closed. His legs lay in a pool of black water. His chest moved in and out slowly.

The water,
Cole thought.
We came through the water—but how—and what—?

“Yenor—” he vomited water again in midsentence. He was dripping wet, head to toe. He wiped a hand across his mouth.
“Yenor’s eye, Dil.”

Her hand stroked his hair in a way that felt almost automatic. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

Cole held his fist up to his mouth and coughed. “Was I a—a fish?”

She shook her head.

“No, I promise. I just—I just made you feel different. I didn’t want to do this alone, and I…”

“Do what?” he asked.

He never got an answer.

“Dilanthia,” Alain rasped. “Are…we there?”

The old man’s eyes had swollen shut.

Cole’s stomach tensed, but there was nothing left inside it to throw up.

Dil scrambled to her grandfather’s side. Wet dirt flew from her hands and knees in clumps. She grabbed Alain under the armpits and dragged him out of the water.

“Yes,” she said. “We’re here. I’m sorry.”

Alain let out a long sigh. Dil stretched him out on the ground.

As Cole watched, a dim orange glow wrapped itself around him.

The light began on the tortured skin of his chest and spread itself around the rest of his body. Memories tickled Cole’s brain—Ryse in Eldan City healing the boy with the broken leg, then on the
Rokwet
healing Litnig—but this was different. The glow was thinner and weaker. There was no miraculous scabbing over. No instantaneous recovery.

Instead, a whole garden’s worth of roots and vines broke through the earth and stretched over Alain’s body like a blanket.

The old man gasped as if he’d been plunged into a stream in the wintertime. The roots engulfed his head, and then all Cole could see of him was his singed hair and the blanket of vegetation moving up and down, up and down with his breath.

Cole rubbed his eyes. “Dil, what—”

He heard a whimper, and she slammed into his chest.

Her head pressed against his shoulder. Her hands pulled at the wet cloth of his shirt. Her body heaved with wracking sobs.

“Promise,” she stammered. “Promise you don’t hate me, Cole. Promise you won’t make me go away. Promise, promise…” Her shoulders shook. Her hair dragged over his face.

Cole moved his mouth so that he could breathe freely, and then he splayed his fingers over her back and pushed her against his chest, and he let her cry and tried to understand what the hell was happening.

She’d led him through the prairie and the forest in silence. Her grandfather had fought like a tiger. She’d turned him into a fish. Or something
like
a fish. She’d turned into one herself, or she wouldn’t have been able to swim so far.

And her eyes had glowed gold in the moonlight.

Wilderleng…

The word was an old one, from stories his mother had told him about people with golden eyes and unusual powers. They were said to live in hiding and bring bad luck and ill will upon those around them.

Dil’s hands twisted his shirt. Her sobbing sounded like an old man gasping for breath.

Cole decided he didn’t care about the stories.

“Promise,” he said. He pressed his lips against her hair. “Promise on my life.”

He meant it. She’d chosen him over her old life. He could choose her as well.

She clutched him harder and took a deep, shuddering breath.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Eventually, she stopped sobbing.

But her hands never left him, and he knelt in the darkness for a long time and held her. He knelt for so long that he forgot where he was. His head nodded forward. His eyelids drooped. His torso swayed backward.

His next sensation was one of cold.

There was damp soil beneath him. The warmth of Dil’s body pressed against his side. The tall, feather-topped grass outside the Forest of Lurathen bobbed and waved around him. The sky was awash with the red-and-orange glow of sunrise.

He sat up, and a wave of pain rocked his head.

Dil lay asleep next to him. Alain, the grove, the cave—none of it was anywhere to be found. He wondered if he’d been dreaming.

Then he looked at his hands.

They were caked in dirt. Brown and yellow stains mottled his fingers and palms. His throat felt raw. His abdomen was sorer than it’d been in years.

Dil bumped against his leg and let out a slow, deep breath. Her eyes fluttered open.

“Dil, what—”

She squeezed her eyes shut again. Her lips trembled. Her fingers dug into the dirt.

Cole discovered that he didn’t need to know—didn’t even
want
to know—what had happened, if the answer was going to hurt her that badly.

“Never mind,” he said.

He ran a hand through his hair and turned away from the rising sun. His body felt like it had been ground between two enormous boulders. “We need to find the others. Quay—”

Cole remembered the fireball. He clamped his mouth shut and stood up.

The others could be dead already.

Cole took Dil’s hands and pulled her to her feet. She sniffed once and squeezed his fingers.

And then they were running with the rising sun toward a hole where once there’d been a cabin.

FORTY-ONE

“You love her still.
This Temple soulweaver of yours.”

Leramis stood on mossy stone atop the roof of the Citadel. A warm sea-spray breeze wisped over his cheeks. The ocean roared and murmured on sharp rocks behind him, six hundred feet down. His mentor stood next to him.

He’d just come, after more than a week of waiting, from an hour-long meeting with the Council of Taers that had felt more like a trial than a debriefing. He’d been upbraided for failing to apprehend Soren Goldguard, berated for failing to report, dressed down and insulted and belittled.

Through it all, he’d stood like stone with his hands at his sides and answered the questions that were put to him.

The quiet shadows of the city of Death’s Head stretched over the skullish contours of Menatar’s tip to his south. A cornucopia of constellations graced the sky: the squat, rounded cross of the Heartwren, slipping minute by minute into the water; the long line of the Bastard’s Sword, following it into the next day; the ribbon of tiny, bright stars called the Fool’s River; the deep, starless blackness of the Abyss; and above it, the five stars in a low, squat X called the Temple’s Gag, or Yenor’s Mark, or the Necromancer’s Bones.

The stars didn’t always follow each other in that order. They shifted with the seasons, with the years, even with the days. They spoke to each person in turn and offered a hint of the future.

Leramis sucked in the cool, clean air of the night. He would never again take the act of breathing for granted after the burns he’d suffered on the
Rokwet.
He rubbed his chest. The skin atop his breastbone had healed into a scarred, puffy, wrinkled mass of flesh.

He wondered how long it would be before he got used to it.

You love her still—

There was no sense in denying it. Ryse and the endless possibilities of her presence in his life filled his thoughts. Over the last ten days, as he’d waited in his cold apartment for the Council’s summons, he’d had little else to think about. He’d questioned many things.

He didn’t say as much to Rhan, but there was no need to. Rhan knew. Rhan
saw.

So Leramis didn’t speak. He watched the stars in silence, and he waited.

“Have you known what it is to lose true love, Leramis?” Rhan asked.

A coldness
rose in Leramis’s heart and whispered to him that he was learning.

“I have,” Rhan continued. “And it’s no small thing.”

Leramis rubbed the tortured skin on his chest again through the cloth of his robe. He remembered falling on the
Rokwet
. He remembered pain. He remembered knowing that he was going to die.

Under the shadow of that knowledge, he’d discovered something he might not have found anywhere else.

No.

He’d expected to regret the things he’d left undone, like redeeming his family’s name and doing great things for the world. But as the threads of his life had slipped through his fingers, he’d mourned not the loss of those grand things but the breaking of the simple promises he’d made to a young woman whose eyes twinkled in his dreams.

Ryse had been the first person he’d ever truly thought he could help. And she’d been the first person who’d looked through his name and believed in his strength and his will.

“What’s your purpose in life, Leramis?” asked Rhan.

He’d told himself the answer so many times he didn’t even think about it anymore.

“To safeguard the River of Souls,” he said.
“To secure the lynchpins of the world.”

But the words sounded wrong even as he spoke them. Guarding the River was Rhan’s purpose, and the purpose of the Council of Taers and the Order.

Leramis wondered if it was still his as well.

A quiet wind swept a gull’s black feather toward the houses of his brothers and sisters in Death’s Head.

“Purposes change,” Rhan said. “Yenor’s will
changes
.”

The feather floated into the night, down and away, farther and farther, until it melted into the shadows and out of Leramis’s life.

“Be sure that you’re able to change too,” Rhan said.

There was an unusual harshness to the way he spoke. A prickly spider of fear clambered over Leramis’s skull and lodged at the base of his neck.

He isn’t talking about my feelings for Ryse,
he realized.
He means something else, something bigger.